A Systems Evaluation of the Educational Information System for Ontario

Abstract

Approaches to the evaluation of on‐line bibliographical retrieval services have so far failed to assess the interrelationships of the various components of the services. This article presents a comprehensive framework for such an evaluation. Variables used in the framework include events occurring during a search cycle; role and status; knowledge and opinion; and cost, price, and demand. The framework is applied to the evaluation of the Educational Information System for Ontario (EISO) on‐line service in order to determine the relationships between search processing variables associated with costs and output variables measuring the client's gain in knowledge and degree of satisfaction.